Be Careful What You Ask the Government to Do for You

  The welcome arch in Stuart, Floriday.  Source of the photo:  online version of the NYT article cited below.

 

STUART, Fla., Oct. 2 — As land-boom boasts went, the 1925 headline was only mildly preposterous:  “Stuart Bigger Than Miami in 10 Years,” it sang.

A cross-state shipping canal was in the works, and Stuart, about 100 miles north of the city it hoped to surpass, sat at the eastern terminus.  It envisioned becoming a thriving commercial hub and built the Stuart Welcome Arch, a proud gateway on the old road into town, to embody that dream.  "Atlantic Gateway to the Gulf of Mexico," its bronze lettering proclaimed.

. . .

The cross-state canal became more bane than boon when the state started using it to flush polluted overflow from Lake Okeechobee out to sea.

“Everyone wanted that canal,” said Sandra Thurlow, a local historian, “and yet it has caused so many problems.”

 

For the full story, see:

ABBY GOODNOUGH.  "STUART JOURNAL; A Symbol Stands, but the Dreams Have Shifted."  The New York Times, Section 1  (Sun.,  October 8, 2006): 16.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

Contra the Pundits: “Buy the Damned Coffee, if it Makes You Happy”

  Source of illustration:  online version of the NYT article cited below.

 

APPARENTLY, I’m an idiot.  Every financial advice columnist seems to be telling me so.

My crime:  buying morning coffee from Starbucks for my wife and me.

Avoiding the regular cup of overpriced coffee has become an easy cliché for financial advisers, a symbol of money frittered away.  The advice has appeared just about everywhere.  Drop the caramel mocha frappu-whatever, they say, or you’ll spend your retirement testing recipes that combine Hamburger Helper and dog food.  David Bach, the author of “The Automatic Millionaire,” pushes what he calls the Latte Factor, which he has defined as “the daily extravagances that drain your resources.”  Another guru, Paul Farrell, has estimated that skipping Starbucks and compounding the savings could save you an eye-popping $500,000 by retirement.  At my own newspaper, Damon Darlin, a financial columnist, has repeatedly brought up this issue.

Before bringing up a point of disagreement — what logicians call the “Big But” — it is common to bestow a few compliments to ease the sting.  So, as a preface to the Big But, let me say that Mr. Darlin is a fine journalist and, for all I know, a swell dancer besides.

Still, I disagree.  Buy the damned coffee, if it makes you happy.  When I show up back at the house after dropping off my high schooler in the morning and I have that latte in hand for my wife, she will sometimes refer to me as “my hero!”  After more than 30 years together, this is about the only time I am called that.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

JOHN SCHWARTZ.  "ESSAY; Skip the Coffee? What’ s Money for, Anyway?"  The New York Times, Section 3, Part 2  (Sun., October 8, 2006):  25.

 

Mellon Allowed Great Innovation By Restraining Intrusive Government

(p. W4) Though scarcely known today, Andrew W. Mellon was a colossus in late 19th-century and early 20th-century America.  He would come to play a major role in the management of the American economy, but first he built one of the country’s great fortunes, one that would rank him today with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.  He is now the subject of a comprehensive, if slightly grudging, biography by David Cannadine, the distinguished British historian.

Mellon is not associated with any single industry, in the way that Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller are.  He was a venture and equity-fund capitalist, one of the first to function on a major scale.  He and his younger brother, Dick, took over their father’s Pittsburgh-based investment and coal-mining business and expanded it into many fields, including copper, oil,  petrochemicals and aluminum (Alcoa).

No banker was as gimlet-eyed; Mr. Cannadine shows Mellon shrewdly and coldly calculating every investment prospect.  Yet few venture capitalists were as daring.  In the 1890s, when Rockefeller was ruthlessly monopolizing the petroleum industry, Mellon didn’t flinch from setting up a competing refinery.  When Mellon finally sold out to Rockefeller, he did so at a considerable profit.  Several years later he came back to oil and eventually built Gulf into an industry giant.

Original Supply-Sider

But Mellon was more than an entrepreneurial industrialist.  In his mid-60s he became a famous — and infamous — public servant, performing as Treasury secretary under three presidents, from 1921 to 1932.  He was the original supply-sider, pushing tax cuts under Presidents Harding and Coolidge.  He argued that the high tax rates left over from World War I were depressing economic activity; that lower rates would turn the economy around; that high-income earners would end up paying more and that low-income earners would be removed from the tax roles entirely.

His program was a fantastic success.  The top rate was cut to 25% from 77%.  The rich did indeed pay more, while low- and middle-income earners saw their tax bills shrink to nothing or next to nothing.  The economy boomed.  The U.S. outstripped more heavily taxed nations, such as Britain and France.  Mellon also pushed painstakingly for the creation of an international monetary system to replace the one shattered by World War I.  The big challenge was huge Allied war debts to the U.S. and onerous German reparations.  Mellon negotiated the easiest terms that were politically possible so that trade and economies could revive.

We sometimes forget just how dynamic the 1920s were in America.  The automobile became a commonplace item for working Americans; labor-saving devices, such as the washing machine, grew ever more common as well; movies and radio provided mass entertainment as never before (an experimental television broadcast was carried out in 1927); and stock ownership widened to include more members of the middle class.

It was a time of great innovation and inventiveness, and in a sense Mellon presided over it all by allowing it to happen without intrusive government policies.

 

For the full review, see:

STEVE FORBES.  "BOOKS; The Man Who Made the Twenties Roar."  The Wall Street Journal    (Fri., October 6, 2006):  W4.

 

Reference for the book:

David Cannadine.  MELLON.  Knopf, 2006.  779 pages, $35

 

 MellonBK.jpg  Source of book image:  online version of the WSJ article cited above.

 

Why Should We Be Forced to Subsidize Those Who Choose to Live in the Boonies?

  Kerry Caruselle, the only passenger on her federally subsidized flight between Pueblo and Denver, leaves the plane.  Source of the photo:  online version of the NYT article cited below.  Grant Campbell has plenty of room to spread out on his federally subsidized flight between Pueblo and Denver.  Source of the photo:  online version of the NYT article cited below.

 

(p. A1)  PUEBLO, Colo. — Hoping for an empty seat beside you on your next flight?  No problem — just schedule a trip to someplace like Kingman, Ariz.; Brookings, S.D.; or Pueblo.

They are among more than 100 locales around the country that receive federally subsidized airline service, and the average number of passengers on each flight is about three.

Most of these flights on 19-seat prop planes have plenty of elbow room — a rare luxury in this age of jampacked commercial jets.  Some major airlines have cut their fleets about 20 percent since 2001 and have abandoned unprofitable routes, meaning planes are flying fuller than at any time since World War II.

The more tranquil cabins come courtesy of the Essential Air Service, put in place when the airline industry was deregulated in 1978.  The idea was to help travelers in smaller cities adjust to the new competitive era of air travel.  The intention was for the service to go away after 10 years, but it was renewed for a second decade — and then made permanent.

Over time, though, the program has come to seem mostly expensive and, to its critics, unessential.

After all, travelers adjusted very well after deregulation, and started driving the extra distance to busier regional airports nearby that offered increasingly cheap and plentiful jet service.  That left the program with (p. C7) mostly empty planes, making them more costly to fly.  Add in higher maintenance and fuel costs, and spending has more than quadrupled since 1996, to $110 million.

That, of course, is not a lot in the federal scheme of things.  But the program is a good case study of how poorly the government sometimes keeps pace with the free market and consumer tastes, and how entrenched interests, even in the face of some creative map-drawing, can keep such a program aloft in the face of efforts to ground it.

. . .

The emptier the subsidized flights, it seems, the more cherished the program became.  Members of Congress regularly pressured the Transportation Department to continue subsidies to towns they represented.  A lobbying group sprang up solely to fight to preserve and expand the program.

 

For the full story, see: 

JEFF BAILEY.  "Subsidies Keep Airlines Flying to Small Towns."  The New York Times   (Fri., October 6, 2006):  A1 & C7.

 

  Source of the graphic:  online version of the NYT article cited above.

Italy Suffers from a “Growing Spirit of Cynicism and Escapism”

  Source of book image:  http://ec3.images-amazon.com/images/P/0767914392.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V57219494_.jpg

 

As anyone can attest who has lived in Italy even briefly, its domestic life can be gracious and sweet.  The question is whether this way of life can survive the many urgent challenges enumerated by Mr. Severgnini:  an abysmal fertility rate, crushing pension obligations, marginal economic growth, a sclerotic legal system, the flight abroad of the most creative young minds, and a growing spirit of cynicism and escapism.

 

For the full review, see:

FRANCIS X. ROCCA.  "BOOKS; An Italian Challenge; Keeping la dolce vita as modernity spreads."  The Wall Street Journal  (Sat., September 9, 2006):  P8.

 

The reference to the book:

Beppe Severgnini.  La Bella Figura. Broadway, 2006.  217 pages, $23.95.

In the Prague of Rudolf II, “Anything Seemed Possible”

  Source of book image:  http://ec3.images-amazon.com/images/P/0802715516.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V61383943_.jpg

 

Ambassadors, nobles and church magnates routinely visited Prague Castle during Rudolf’s reign (1576-1612); so did astronomers and astrologists, alchemists, philosophers, charlatans and anyone else with something marvelous to relate.  Bureaucratic busybodies might wait months for an audience with the emperor, but his doors flew open for those with esoteric knowledge.

. . .

Prague Castle was the perfect emblem of Rudolf’s scattered interests.  It contained one of the greatest painting collections in Europe — including works by Durer, Arcimboldo, Titian and Veronese.  Its inventory also included Egyptian mummies, stuffed exotic birds, unicorn horns, whale teeth, bezoars (gall stones taken from the stomach of animals, thought to be antidotes to poison), the nails of Noah’s ark and one dried and preserved dragon.

If a visitor to the castle wandered into its library, he might well come across such dodgy works as "Arcana arcanissima," "De Alchemiae difficultatibus" and "Mysterium cosmographicum," many dedicated to the monarch by their grateful authors.  Yet if the visitor climbed to the top of the castle’s so-called Bishop’s Tower on a starry night, he might encounter the great astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler charting the sky.  Clearly, it was a magical moment in the history of Western civilization, when anything seemed possible.  Mr. Marshall brings it all wonderfully to life.

 

For the full review, see: 

STUART FERGUSON.  "BOOKS; Sense and Sorcery in Prague; Ready for the Renaissance; but not quite prepared to give up the unicorn."  The Wall Street Journal  (Sat., September 9, 2006):  P9.

(Note:  ellipsis added.) 

 

The book reference is: 

Peter Marshall.  The Magic Circle of Rudolf II.  Walker, 2006.  276 pages, $24.95.

 

Entrepreneur Makes Risky, Massive Infrastructure Bet

  A Louisiana site where Cheniere is building a terminal for liquified natural gas.  Source of image:  online version of the NYT article cited below.

Charif Souki is making a risky business decision.  If he is wrong, he and his investors will lose much. If he is right, consumers will be better off, having a larger supply of liquified natural gas (LNG).  And if he is right, he should be allowed to make a lot of money, both because that is just, and because it is useful for those who have bet right in the past, to have ample means to bet right in the future.   

(p. C1)  CAMERON PARISH, La. — The Sabine River channel, where alligators and speckled trout live alongside petrochemical plants and oil refineries, has suddenly become the center of a quiet revolution in the world of natural gas.

And it is mainly at the prodding of a little-known company called Cheniere Energy, with help from Exxon Mobil and Sempra Energy.  Together they have overcome formidable regulatory hurdles to build three new liquefied natural gas terminals on the channel that will double the nation’s capacity to import natural gas by 2011.

It has been 24 years since anyone on American shores has built a new liquefied natural gas terminal.  Two of the country’s four existing onshore terminals, which dock tankers the size of aircraft carriers ferrying supercooled gas from places like Qatar and Trinidad, were mothballed for years because production at home was plentiful and prices were low.

As recently as five years ago almost nobody in the energy world thought it possible to make money from a new American terminal project — with price tags that start at $600 million — let alone get a federal permit.

One lonely believer was Charif Souki, a Lebanese immigrant entrepreneur who had previously raised (p. C4) money for real estate in Paris and hotels in Hawaii before becoming chairman of Cheniere, a floundering gas exploration company.  Not even the 9/11 attacks, which made many people on the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts view liquefied natural gas terminals as potential terrorist targets, diverted him from his vision.

Now, even as natural gas prices sag, along with his company’s stock price, and the word glut is on the tip of the tongue among the drilling crowd, Mr. Souki says he is fixed on the longer view.

He is convinced the nation will need to import more gas because North American production is declining.  That is the same view Mr. Souki held six years ago, when he decided to shake up the company’s business plan.  He defiantly changed its stock symbol to LNG in 2003, and devoted himself to scoping out the country’s coastlines for potential terminal sites.

The already energy-intensive shoreline along the Gulf of Mexico, he concluded, made the most sense, economically and politically, and he started buying real estate in uninhabited harbors close to existing pipelines and gas-thirsty refineries and petrochemical plants.

“People were actually amused that we would be thinking about importing natural gas,” dryly giggled Mr. Souki, 53, a man with a taste for double-breasted suits.  “Nobody took us very seriously.”

Cheniere was so unprofitable and utterly spurned by investors in 2002 that Mr. Souki had to borrow $30,000 from his company’s president just to meet a payroll.  But over the last four years, Mr. Souki has managed to arrange financing, sign up long-term buyers and master the regulatory process. 

 

For the full story, see:

CLIFFORD KRAUSS.  "A Big Bet on Natural Gas."  The New York Times  (Weds., October 4, 2006):  C1 and C4.

GasTerminalLousianaMap.gif    The map shows the area in which the terminal is being built.  The bottom photo shows a Louisiana site where Cheniere is building a terminal for liquified natural gas.  Source of image:  online version of the NYT article cited above.

300,000,000 Strong, and Free

LifeExpectancyGraph.gif  Source of graph:  online version of the WSJ article cited below.

 

The Census Bureau tells us that some time in the weeks ahead the U.S. population will reach 300 million.  . . .

This demographic milestone is not cause for alarm — as some prophets of doom would have it.  Rather, it is cause for celebration.  We 300 million Americans are on balance healthier and wealthier and freer than any population ever:  We breathe cleaner air, drink cleaner water, earn higher incomes, have more leisure time, and live in less crowded housing.  Every natural resource we depend on — water, food, copper and, yes, even oil — is far more abundant today measured by affordability than when our population was 100 million or even 30 million.

Thanks to the rapid pace of technological progress, there’s every reason to believe these resources will be still more abundant when our population reaches 400 million — which should happen about 40 years from now.  As the late economist Julian Simon reminded us, thanks to our free market capitalist system, the history of America is one of leaving the storehouse for every successive generation more endowed with wealth, knowledge and natural resources.

 

For the full commentary, see:

STEPHEN MOORE.  "Supply Side; 300,000,000."  Wall Street Journal  (Tues., October 3, 2006):  A26.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

Equatorial Guinea’s Kleptocracy: More on Why Africa is Poor

KristofNick.jpg  Nicholas D. Kristof.  Source of image:  online verison of the NYT commentary cited below.

 

The founding president of this country was a witch doctor who murdered tens of thousands, put enemies’ heads on pikes, denounced education and spread land mines on the road out of his country to prevent people from fleeing.  This was then so vile a place that an American diplomat stabbed another to death here in 1971 and claimed in his trial that he had been driven insane partly by the screams of all the people being tortured.

When the president was finally ousted in 1979, he ran off into the bush with $60 million packed in suitcases.  But he was pursued, and in a shootout, the nation’s entire foreign exchange reserves burned up.

. . .

Equatorial Guinea traditionally has been Africa’s poster boy for bad governance.  Even after the old witch doctor was ousted, the kleptocracy continued under Teodoro Obiang, the current president.  A new book about the country, “The Wonga Coup,” notes that in 2004 President Obiang bought a Boeing 737, one of six personal planes, for $55 million, and outfitted it with a king-sized bed and gold-plated fittings in the extra-large bathroom.

Schools and clinics are needy, but Forbes lists President Obiang as the world’s eighth richest ruler, with a net worth of $600 million.  Just last year, “The Wonga Coup” says, the president’s son spent the equivalent of a third of his country’s entire education budget on a vacation home in South Africa and three cars — two Bentleys and a Lamborghini.

 

For the full commentary, see:

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF.  "Optimism and Africa."  The New York Times  (Tues., October 3, 2006):  A27.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

 

The book mentioned in the commentary is: 

Roberts, Adam.  The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa.  PublicAffairs, 2006.

 

    Source of book image:  http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1586483714.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V65100719_.jpg

The Missing Pillow: A Lack of Incentives Leaves an Obvious ‘Job’ Undone


In late July, I had an appointment for a treadmill stress-test at Omaha’s Methodist Hospital.  They told me the process would be over in an hour, but it took about two hours, due to another patient having some sort of crisis during their stress-test. 

They had me put on a gown, they stuck an I-V "dye" drip in back of my hand, and they pasted about six electrodes to my chest, after shaving and applying something like sand paper to the parts of the chest where the electrodes were attached.  Then they had me lie on my side on a hard table, to wait.  It was very uncomfortable.  The first nurse said that there was supposed to be a pillow on the table, but did nothing to obtain one.  Every several minutes some technician or nurse would stop in to ask if I was ready for them.  (I was always ready.)  But it turned out that someone needed to do something to me first, and that person was, I guess, taking care of the crisis next door.  At least one of these visitors also mentioned that I was supposed to have a pillow, but did nothing to acquire one.  If memory serves, the first nurse came back in, and again mentioned that I was supposed to have a pillow, but again did nothing to obtain one.

These people were all pleasant and friendly.  For example, they had a lot of friendly chats amongst themselves, that I could not help but over-hear.  (One of them was pregnant with twins, but did not know the genders of the babes-to-be, and so had not yet spent the time to come up with names.)

But two hours later, when the whole process was over, I still did not have a pillow.

A week or two after the test, I received a several page survey from Methodist Hospital asking a bunch of questions about how I thought they had done during the test.  You see they really "care" about my opinion.  (They also run frequent, slick TV ads about how much they "care.")

Marketers, and management gurus, say that organizations need to invest in surveys and the like to figure out what the customer wants and needs.  And Clayton Christensen advocates spending resources to figure out what "job" the customer needs to have done.  And maybe, sometimes, it does take surveys and research.

But sometimes it is obvious that the customer needs a pillow.

What is missing is not a survey, or statistical analysis.

What is missing is the incentive for someone to go get the pillow. 

 

P.S.  You may wonder, then, if it is simply a mistake for the hospital to send out the survey?  I suspect that those who send out the survey are not making a mistake, but are trying to get a different job done than the one that appears to be intended.  It appears that they are trying to find out what customers want and need.  But maybe they already know that.  Maybe they are mainly sending out the survey so that if anyone asks if they are "customer-oriented" they can whip out the survey to prove that yes-indeed, they sure are.  In other words, the point of the survey is not to learn about customers; it is to cover rear-ends.


How Speculators Stablilize Gas Prices

As long ago as 1953, Milton Friedman argued that speculation normally helps to stabilize prices rather than destabilize them.

Mr. Friedman’s argument was applied to currency trading, but the same reasoning works here.  If speculative trading tends to push prices higher when they are already high and lower when they are already low, then traders must be buying high and selling low.

That would mean that traders have to lose money on average — which does not seem very likely.  To the contrary, speculative traders try to buy low and sell high, activities that by their nature tend to push prices up when they are too low and down when they are too high.

Since Mr. Friedman’s 1953 article several papers have been published, both supporting and attacking this argument.  But the general principle seems quite robust.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

Hal R. Varian.  "ECONOMIC SCENE; The Rapidly Changing Signs at the Gas Station Show Markets at Work."  The New York Times  (Thurs., August 24, 2006):  C3.

 

The Milton Friedman article that Varian refers to, is: 

Friedman, Milton. "The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates." In Friedman. Essays in Positive Economics. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1953.